Predicting DRAM Failures at Scale: A Two-Stage Approach for Heterogeneous Systems
Abstract
Memory failures in large-scale production environments pose critical threats to system reliability and service availability. While existing studies have conducted in-depth analyses of the temporal and spatial correlations of memory errors, differences in characteristics across architectures remain largely unexplored. To uncover these overlooked correlations, this paper conducts an extensive analysis of over 130,000 DDR4 DIMMs collected from large-scale heterogeneous production clusters over a nine-month period. Through systematic spatial and temporal analysis across two Intel x86 architectures and four major DRAM vendors, we uncover five new findings and propose a novel twostage training strategy. This strategy addresses sample quality issues by applying temporal weighting to positive samples and adaptive reweighting to negative samples. It also incorporates comprehensive multi-dimensional feature engineering, covering static, spatial, temporal, and micro-level characteristics. Finally, it integrates dual-driven sampling strategies and adaptive prediction timing to balance prediction accuracy and operational efficiency. Extensive evaluation shows that our CatBoost-based model achieves F1-scores of 49.9% on Intel x86v5 and 57.6% on Intel x86v6, substantially outperforming existing methods. This cross-architecture validation demonstrates the robustness and generalization of our approach across different hardware platforms. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first large-scale cross-architecture analysis of memory error patterns and provides new insights for production-scale memory failure prediction systems.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
Distributed systems and fault tolerance
Reliability and Maintenance Optimization
Publication details
- Journal / source
- IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)
- Pages
- 1–14
- Publication date
- 31 January 2026
- Language
- EN